MOST WANTED: DRILLING DOWN/ARTS COVERAGE; Curtain Falling

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Published: October 4, 2004

As daily newspapers lost both readers and advertisers in the last few years, the amount of space devoted to articles about the arts shrank as well. That is one of the findings of ''Reporting the Arts II,'' a study released over the weekend by the National Arts Journalism program at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

The study, which compared the arts coverage in more than a dozen metropolitan newspapers in October 2003 to coverage in October 1998, had some encouraging news for people who like to get their cultural news from newspapers: arts sections in those papers suffered fewer cutbacks, at least on a proportional basis, than the main news and business pages over the last five years. To the regret of those who would rather read about Barry Levinson than Barry Bonds, however, the arts sections did not fare as well as the sports pages, which, the study found, have actually grown in prominence. JACQUES STEINBERG